DigitalOcean launches Kubernetes as a Service
Thu 13 Dec 2018
DigitalOcean has announced the official release of its managed Kubernetes service, following May’s private early access release
KubeCon/CloudNativeCon took place this week, which means that any company doing anything related to Kubernetes, containers or DevOps were shouting loud and proud about all their latest projects and updates.
Among the litany of tech firms making announcements was DigitalOcean, which announced that its managed Kubernetes service is now available to all developers, albeit in limited release.
Popular with developers, the cloud service provider is known for simple workflows, clean interfaces, and ultra cheap VPS hosting, and says its Kubenetes as a Service is now ready for mission-critical applications.
The service is straightforwardly dubbed ‘DigitalOcean Kubernetes’ and is being marketed with the same selling points that have made its cloud services so popular: speed, simplicity and slick UIs.
“Kubernetes promises to be one of the leading technologies in a developer’s arsenal to gain the scalability, portability and availability needed to build modern apps. Unfortunately, for many it’s extremely complex to manage and deploy,” said DigitalOcean VP of Product Shiven Ramji.
“With DigitalOcean Kubernetes, we make running containerised apps consumable for any developer, regardless of their skills or resources. We do this by automating the management of Kubernetes clusters and the provisioning of nodes to make it faster and easier to run containerized apps.”
The initial release covered all the most essential bases for deploying Kubernetes containerised apps: node provisioning, durable storage availability, security and scalability. The official release adds guided config experiences, open-APIs and Kubernetes version 1.12.1 support to the mix, with 1.31.1 support on the horizon.
Although “officially” released it appears DigitalOcean had to skimp on some features to get the service out in time for the KubeCon press. General release is planned for 2019 with additional features – but you’ll have to wait until next to year to find out what will be added.
Kubecon
As ever, it was impossible to keep up with the laundry list of announcements made at this year’s Kubecon. Here’s a brief summary of the major announcements:
- Oracle announces the Oracle Cloud Native Framework..
- Google and Iguazio power the intelligent edge for smart retail and IoT Solutions.
- Google Cloud announces beta availability of Istio on GKE.
- Nutanix announces Cloud Native stack.
- Twistlock introduces Hybrid Cloud Service Discovery; Expands Istio, Kubernetes, and Serverless Functions Support
- Capital One joins CNCF as Gold End User Member.
- Datawire cuts time to production for Kubernetes Microservices with next-generation Ambassador Pro API Gateway.
- Red Hat contributes etcd, the cornerstone of Kubernetes, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation after its Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept it as an incubation-level hosted project.
